cw: problematic language [?], rape & rape culture, gender socialization.

[nerdflighter]

SO I received an anon on tumblr, as I do, which said:

Re, Radfem rethoric about 'male/female socialisation' it's also kinda sad I think because 'masculin vs feminin socialisation' is a really good way do describe some things? Like (And radfems, ironically, are HUGE on that one??) how me being afab resulted in having stuff like 'don't go home alone in the dark (because you are a womynnnn)' drilled into me and now I'm STILL nervouse alone on the streets even when I pass as a man and I know my cis-men friends just. can't even comprehend that?

(socialisation anon) and like I LIKE the angle of 'this is socialisation, not inherent' because I DIDN'T get to have a childhood as a boy but I still AM one (sometimes. I think. things are confusing) and thus it refames these (occassionally dysphoria-inducing) anxieties as something that was DONE TO, assigned to me. Like. Society decided I HAVE to be a girl (tho I am not) and then that thus I HAVE to be anxious about [Rape Culture Shit].

(socialisation anon) and like I LIKE the angle of 'this is socialisation, not inherent' because I DIDN'T get to have a childhood as a boy but I still AM one (sometimes. I think. things are confusing) and thus it refames these (occassionally dysphoria-inducing) anxieties as something that was DONE TO, assigned to me. Like. Society decided I HAVE to be a girl (tho I am not) and then that thus I HAVE to be anxious about [Rape Culture Shit].

“socialization” theory as it stands is a hot mess. esp because of terfs, who use it to claim things like “trans women have male socialization”........which they definitely don’t lmao........socialization theory is good but radfems fucked it up

i think there needs to be space to talk about the ways in which both trans men and trans women report being affected by rape culture and that lens cannot be gender socialization...because when we talk about gender socialization as something that takes place in this sort of vacuum where everyone is socialized as the gender they really are...........that does not reflect reality and it does not reflect the mental state of the people the socialization is supposedly being acted on. like i don’t mean to say that people are socialized as their agabs - that’s not true either. there’s a middle ground between 'trans women experience the same socialization as cis women' and 'trans women experience the same socialization as cis men'. neither of those are true, because trans women aren’t cis and they aren’t men.

socialization theory can account for the ways in which people perceived as women (trans men) and people who are women (trans women) both live under the threat of rape, structure their lives around that threat, that isn't gender socialization

because the entire point of radfem gender socialization (man am i tired of typing these long words out) is that males don't experience rape culture...........which is predicated on the assumption that men can't be raped. if you can't be raped how can you experience rape culture?

so the core of their argument against trans women is:
1. all women live under the threat of rape
2. this is female socialization
3. males rape
4. males cannot BE raped
5. males experience rapist socialization (because only females can be raped and they are never the rapists.........so the people doing the raping have rapist socialization.
6. trans women are male
7. trans women do not live under the threat of rape (blatantly untrue and easily disproven by the stats btw)
8. trans women are male rapists

but the material reality is that trans women are raped more than anyone else in the queer community and trans men also live a lot of their lives wondering if they’re gonna be raped, as you just noted, even after they pass.

so how do you reconcile these experiences - clearly the result of socialization of SOME kind, without resorting to gender as the axis of violence?

my proposed answer is *drumroll* rape culture socialization

important note: when I say ‘rapeable’ I do not mean ‘deserves to be raped’. I do not mean ‘is always raped’. when I say ‘rapeable’ what I mean is, ‘able to experience rape [as a form of violence]’. rape is a form of violence like any other, and in some sense we’re all rapeable just as we’re all killable: we possess a physical body, that somebody can come along and hurt. it’s not a statement about whether our bodies deserve to be harmed or violated in such a way, and I beg you to not take it as such.

here’s how that goes. everyone experiences rape culture socialization. e v e r y o n e. but some groups in particular have messages directed at them that tell them they could well be victims of rape if they don’t fulfill certain prerequisites that will supposedly prevent them from being raped. the primary target of these messages from the POV of society are afab people. afab people, which for society is synonymous with ‘women’ are socially conditioned to think of themselves as people against whom rape can be committed (im sorry for the convoluted sentence phrasing). so trans men absorb this message that they’re people against whom this form of violatory violence can and will be used, especially in a “corrective” manner.

by contrast, cis men by and large don’t see themselves as rapeable. that is not to say that cis men don’t get raped - just that they don’t constantly worry about being raped because society doesn’t push male bodies as rapeable. however, society does treat trans women as “failed men” or as predators themselves, or as “traps”, all of which are ways of saying “acceptable target.” so trans women, in addition to absorbing messages directed at women (because they’re women, duh) about how women are rapeable, also absorb messages about trans women as uniquely rapeable.

so they’re socialized in a rape culture too.

so I believe what you’re experiencing, anon, is not female socialization but rape culture socialization, which is something that affects each and every one of us.


thoughts welcome, and please let me know if someone's already thought of this even though I swear I came by this honestly I really am behind on all the reading I should be doing......lmao. Anyway. I'm not posting that answer until I can be reasonably sure that I won't be misinterpreted TOO badly, and a part of that is clearing up my phrasing and sentences. My answer has been pasted verbatim as I wrote it on tumblr (which in turn was pasted in from a rant I put in a discord server) and I really hope it makes sense yeezus. Anyway, have at it.

Comments

[queermermaids]

edited for more detail!

My sociology text book describes socialization as this, Socialization: the process by which people learn the characteristics of their group—the knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, norms, and actions thought appropriate for them, and explains that we experience socialization throughout the entirety of our lives, because we are always changing how the world views us and characterizes us changes as we age, at the most basic level. People who are approaching middle age will start to be socialized by agents of socialization (people or groups that affect our self concept, attitudes, behaviors, or other orientations toward life) and will start to act more "middle aged", or like preteens acting more like teens as they grow older, due to media representation of how teens act, their friends around them, and the adults in their lives influencing the development of their concept of self.

Gender socialization (learning society’s “gender map,” the paths in life set out for us because we are male or female) is the same way, constant throughout a persons life. So no matter how much radfems focus on early socialization (socialization of children/babies by parents, society, media and other agents of socialization) as trans people come out and even before they come out and just realize they aren't cis, they are being socialized as their gender.

another thing that I really cant say much about but, I think @hellofriendsiminthedark said like months ago that if you live in a society, you experience the same kinds of bigotry that others experience, even if it isn't directed at you. The concept of "experience" does not leave room for people who literally experience it happening to the next person, that is experience too. So white people "experience" racism, if they exist in a racist society and are involved in everyday life. Men "experience" rape culture (especially in the context of producing more socially excused/acceptable forms of rape and rapists), cis people "experience" transphobia as they can see it exists and can replicate it if not taught why its wrong.

If you are wondering about the wording of "rapeable", I don't particularly like it. I feel like "victimization" works a lot better, because so much of the misogynistic protection of women in society is based on not only rape but also intimate abuse as well. The reason why men don't consider themselves to be "victimized" is because of male socialization, "you can't be a victim of rape/intimate abuse/anything else considered inherently female but does affect men" type shiz.
I could go on rants about the gendering of victimhood and how it has negative ripple effects to not just survivor activism but also like post-colonialism and post-genocide activism, but I digress.

I want people to talk about how they were raised and how they were and continue to be socialized by agents of socialization because the radfem definition is awful and the sociological definition is an amazing tool to understand why you act the way you act, why you believe what you believe and what you can do to change that if it is causing you strife.

oh and one last thing, trans women are not the most sexually assaulted queer subgroup, its trans men then trans women. its not a super significant difference (something like 40% of trans men to 35% of trans women).

obvious tw's and stuff, idk

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

A useful concept you may be interested in incorporating is "punitive rape," which is essentially a rebranding of "corrective rape," but one which shifts focus away from the false narrative of "I'm raping you because [I think] I'm fixing you" in order to shine light on the true justification, which is "you are wrong/deviant and I am punishing you for it." Queer people are punitively raped for not matching what some person believes to be proper. Many "corrective" rapists don't actually believe their actions are going to change their victim--they're just looking to shame/humiliate/punish/violate them. Non-queer women are also punitively raped for either being too open to sex or not available enough (Madonna-whore paradigm). Disabled people are also punitively raped, as are a bunch of other classes of people who aren't coming readily to mind right now.

Socialization is a thing, and it is useful! However what radfems do with gender is they misunderstand how socialization works. They believe that each individual is socialized into one specific gender, never to be taught a proper concept of the other gender except as "other." They discuss boys who only spend time with fathers and girls who only spend time with mothers, and how society is structured such that from the moment of birth, children are only ever given the opportunity to live life as their assigned gender, and thus can never fully comprehend the other side (ie radfems do think gender is socially constructed... but they also think that social construction is correct and innate or something).

There are a number of fatal flaws here... which I guess I'm just going to list:

• Assumption that the gendered worlds people are socialized into are globally and historically stagnant/relatable to one another: A big part of early second wave feminist theory (which radical feminism is sort of an offshoot of) is that women's oppression is universal across space and time. Western feminist anthropologists pointed to other cultures and went "wow, these women are oppressed" without giving a shit about the nuances of how, in the context of those non-Western societies, some of the experiences they were debasing weren't actually comparable to what they saw as oppression. They also did this when looking back at historical gender roles and decided that every condition of women ever was an expression of oppression. Much in the same way as it's possible to frame literally anything as problematic through some lens or another, it's super easy to call anything oppression if you ignore enough actual social structures. But yeah, radical feminism heavily relies upon the narrative that women are oppressed, that their oppression is innate in all cultures of the world, and that this oppression is the basis for unity among all women (and is obviously rooted in biological oppression, which is what all these women from all these different cultures innately share, so it must be the root!). Radfems think there is one universal narrative for how women are socialized (and one for men), but this ignores the ways in which Western gender roles and gender/sex binarism should not actually be mapped onto every other society ever.



• Assumption that socialization is not reversible/revisable beyond some undefined critical age: There are some good critiques out there about how radfems have this unspoken argument that children are locked into an irreversible set of socialized worldviews when they are incredibly young, and that, much like how it becomes difficult to perfectly acquire a new language after a critical period in brain development, it's impossible to perfectly escape that initial socialization. The age at which you're locked into your forever gendered worldview is never specified, but is always assumed to be way younger than whatever given person is the subject of discourse. (Self-declared trans children? Impossible. That eight-year-old has already completed the entirety of their gender socialization already.) Actual socialization is a perpetually ongoing process, wherein new information is integrated into old schemas. But radfems believe that infant girls in pink dresses already have maternal instincts and tiny boys in footie pajamas are forever doomed to dominate any social space they're in, with no hope of learning otherwise, despite this having been "learned" behavior in the first place (except that it's also innate... radfems aren't too consistent when you look closely).



• Assumption that "other" is an inaccessible and untenable concept: So remember how I said radfems think men-socialized-as-men can only ever understand womanhood as some vague and mysterious "other" from themselves? This is why they believe trans women are men trying to escape male privilege/co-opt a caricature of womanhood (which is innately rich in a way men will never understand!!!!), and why trans men are just women who feel shame at embracing their womanhood (because they've obviously been Tainted by female oppression as a result of socialization and can never actually be men the way men-socialized-as-men are, so they're deluding themselves). But because radfems think that manhood and womanhood are not only concrete but also discrete, they don't get that disagreeing with who you were told you were is just as reasonable of a rationale for being a member of another class, just as much as agreeing that you are of another class. This kind of radical feminism has no existing schema in place to view "I'm sure as hell not a [assigned gender at birth]" as a sensical statement for justifying trans identity, even though it is and it functions sensically within a social world where no individual is presumed able to fully conceptualize what the other is.



• Just generally that whole assumption that the "other" class cannot be conceptualized by somebody who was not socialized into it: It's really kind of your standard glorification of empathy at the expense of sympathy--even if you want to stand by an argument that a person from a privileged class will never have the exact gravity of experiences as a member of an oppressed class, you still have to realize that microcosms of oppression can still exist at smaller social scales which do not necessarily correspond to institutional-level lines of power, and also that punitive acts against an oppressed class can be misdirected towards an unintended target/acted out in proximity to members of a privileged class. Even if an individual man can never experience the exact childhood full of fear and shame that an individual woman experienced, that doesn't mean that man is irreparably doomed to being an outsider to women's oppression. Again, gender roles should be understood within the context of culture, so if a woman grew up in one culture with a certain "socialization" of what it meant to be a woman, and then moved into another culture where womanhood was totally different... she would also never be able to experience that exact kind of childhood, and yet she is nonetheless embraced as a woman who was socialized into womanhood the exact way as all other woman are/have been.



• Also just like... again the non-reversable/unalterable socialization thing: Radfems debase trans manhood on the basis that it is not true (ie cis) manhood, and trans womanhood is not cis (ie real) womanhood... and yet time and time again, it has been demonstrated that despite many trans peoples' assimilatory goals, it often makes more sense to conceptualize trans genderhood as conceptually related to but simultaneously distinct from cis genderhood. Thus, a theory of identity formation which has to rely upon the premise of a gendered socialization would do much better to understand trans woman socialization and trans man socialization as phenomena removed from cis male and cis female socialization. One way such a model might manifest is that male socialization for a trans woman ends the second she becomes receptive to even a hint to a possibility that she may not actually be a cis male. A questioning trans woman might imbibe the world through dual lenses of cis manhood and trans womanhood at once, for example, in an effort to determine which is most personally appropriate, thus being dually socialized for a period of time. It could be argued that a truly cis man who has never questioned his sexuality may never be socialized as a cis or trans woman, but the fact of the matter is that it's almost impossible to imagine anybody ever going through their whole live without being even moderately impacted by any kind of queer-adjacent life experience which at any point ever informed their worldview...


• Misunderstanding of the ways in which people are forced to interact with the social world through various lenses and codes as a result of varied social contexts: ...which is just generally why isn't not really useful to understand gendered socialization as something which falls along gendered lines. It's more like we're all socialized into certain normative systems, like amatonormativity, gender/sex binarism/inextricability, conventional [gendered] beauty standards, certain kinds of sociosexual prudism, etc. We know that the standards and expectations are, but some people aren't necessarily pushed to examine their implications... but that doesn't mean they're fundamentally incapable of thinking critically beyond their own personal firsthand life experiences; after all, racist white people whose social views are informed by insular life experiences aren't forever doomed to never view the world through a critical race lens. But anyways, I got a little away from the point I wanted to make, which was that little girls don't only interact with their mothers. Little girls grow up watching how mothers and fathers interact, how brothers and mothers interact, how teachers and students interact, how nannies and children interact. Gender is informed by more than just the most obvious recurring interpersonal interactions (which is why children who are raised "genderless" often still feel pressure to conform to their assigned gender, and why children with amazing parents can still turn into bad eggs). (Also I'm a really big fan of readings of gender roles which position things like "little girl" and "mother" and "businesswoman" and "emotional laborer" as different embodied genders with contradictory expectations/roles from one another, despite constantly being assumed to be one consistent and infallible gender.) I, as a person who exists in two cultures, have two simultaneous but contradictory understandings of what man- and womanhood are, and I am able to shift which lens I am using based on context, much like how people generally code switch in all kinds of situations. People are not tethered to one worldview/"socialization," but rather embody a variety of social identities all at once, and develop each one in a way which does not necessarily have implications for the others.

Unfortunately, trying to say anything about rafems which spans more than a single, superficially "agreeable" sound bite (like "terfs are bad") is a futile effort on tumblr, and if your post gets around, it will inevitable attract the most convoluted and unnecessary attention you can imagine. And there's really not much you can do about those people, who go and deliberately misread things and choose to understand multifaceted arguments through a lens of absolutism. Which is to say that radfems don't give a shit if your post makes sense, they'll still get mad about it and try to twist it into something totally off-base.

Re: obvious tw's and stuff, idk

[nerdflighter]

I put off even reading this for an embarrassingly long time, because of discourse-related shit mental health, but on reading this I...agree wholeheartedly with everything you said, and also had a satisfying number of satisfying ping! moments when you said something i already knew to be true/had inferred to be true just from looking around myself. like the point about radfems thinking socialization is like, irreversible and permanent, and the way they think it's impossible for a member of one supposedly-discrete social group to empathise with another supposedly-discrete social group. I bet it infuriates them that that shit happens anyway, because those social groups aren't fucking discrete

Anyway. I read it through, as I said, and I'm not sure whether you're pointing out errors in my reasoning or...the other thing? urgh. this is probably more of me being bad at parsing tone and intent but I just...do not know. (no hard feelings either way, ftr)

a theory of identity formation which has to rely upon the premise of a gendered socialization would do much better to understand trans woman socialization and trans man socialization as phenomena removed from cis male and cis female socialization. One way such a model might manifest is that male socialization for a trans woman ends the second she becomes receptive to even a hint to a possibility that she may not actually be a cis male.

I found this bit really interesting, because it jives with something I've been turning around in my head for a while - it sounds like you're quoting something, and if so: can I read the source?

[nerdflighter]

I read that post!! It was super interesting and informed the way I approached writing that wall of text up above :) I hoped it came across that I think the cultures and contexts were raised in affect all of us, and that men are victims as often as women but not really encouraged to perceive themselves that way, which is the key difference I was trying to highlight. if it didn't come across, I'll go back and edit it until it does.

your thoughts about the word rapeable are valuable, and I'll work on that change.

that's...an interesting and depressing statistic, and it's the kind of thing I'd love to spread, if you can give me a source link? I have always wondered at the rates at which transmasc people are assaulted; I'd love to read more about it. thanks!

Re: obvious tw's and stuff, idk

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

It's not a quote and I'm not sure if I have any decent length standalone texts that talk about questioning identity, but I'll dig around later.

The thought process was kind of like... people typically don't think to do queer readings of their lives until they start questioning their own queerness. If you fit into normative structures, you have no reason to really engage with them and position yourself against them. People who are (closeted and) questioning have a really neat positionality and embody a lot of dissonance and dualities as a result of living these sort of "double lives," wherein they occupy the same normative spaces as before, but now they have this unshakeable awareness that there's more to consider beyond that. It's kind of like class consciousness in that way--once you gain the awareness that there's something going on, it sticks with you forever.

I was also drawing from some really old gender socialization discourse. I remember this one argument I liked that trans women don't go through male socialization, but rather they experience closeted trans woman socialization, wherein instead of internalizing messages about machismo and masculinity, they actually internalize messages about transphobia and transmisogyny and the ways they have to submit to keep themselves safe and the ways they will always be rejected by institutional structures.

And while this is one way to understand trans identity through a framework of gender socialization, I think it does nonetheless have many of the failings that are inherent to any such framework, in that it still positions something as innate, whether it's the coherency of transness, the messages that the collective sum of all trans folks receive from society, the sensicalness of any gender identity, etc.

So basically I'm like "a lot of people understand that some theory or another doesn't work well and they try to resolve it by expanding it, without actually addressing the flaws which are fundamental to that theory. In this case, that would mean expanding a theory of gender socialization to address trans genders, for example by making new categories for people to be socialized into, ie trans ones. However this approach doesn't actually do anything about a lot of the critiques to be had of the original theory." It's not really directed at you or a statement that this is what you were doing, but more of idle commentary at solutions I've already seen to the issue, potentially with an implied warning that This Is a Thing.

[queermermaids]

oh yay I'm glad you saw that post! Your original post doesn't explicitly mention it but because I thought of it almost immediately while reading it I think you got the point across very well, no need to edit it in if you don't want to.

I saw a facebook post that explained this study [https://www.transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/USTS-Full-Report-FINAL.PDF] and the findings about sexual assault start on page 205. I saw that post months ago so my previous description was wrong (sorry about that!).

"Experiences also varied across gender, with transgender men (51%) and non-binary people with female on their original birth certificate (58%) being more likely to have been sexually assaulted, in contrast to transgender women (37%) and nonbinary people with male on their original birth
certificate (41%) (Figure 15.16)." pg. 205

Re: obvious tw's and stuff, idk

[nerdflighter]

omg yeah that sounds so very interesting!! thanks for sharing it <3 ive been tossing around the idea of trans woman socialization as distinct from cis socialization for a while now, and it's good to see it validated